BobRyan said:
lordkalvan said:
What evidence is there beyond the text that might support one person's interpretation over another's?
Is sounder evidence to be found in what is claimed to be the literal word of God (the Bible) or in what can be interpreted as the actual work of God (Nature)?
See that link above addressing evidence "beyond the text".
You have not addressed my question as to which of the many estimates for the age of Earth derived from biblical analysis we should prefer.
The 'evidence' cited in your links bears little relevance to estimates of the age of Earth in the range referred to in my initial post. Some of the timescales mentioned are in the tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Many if not all of the arguments repeated in your link are PRATTs that have already been convincingly shown to be erroneous elsewhere (check out the Talk Origins website at
http://www.talkorigins.org/ and also
http://www.gate.net/~rwms/crebuttals.html for many such refutations).
However, I do not want to become bogged down in a case by case argument about each claim in your link. Can we concentrate on one or perhaps two that support a particular estimate for the age of Earth derived from the Bible? And first can we have that estimate and how it is justified in preference to any others?
Also Recall that "the evidence in the text" is part of the subject for this thread.
Indeed, which is why, as a starting point for discussion, I asked for that evidence and why it might be that one estimate should be preferred over another. '[T]he evidence in the text' has yet to be explained. Also, 'evidence in the text' is not the only evidence that is available to us; surely God also placed evidence in the natural world that surrounds us? Why should we prefer the one over the other?
BTW this is still going unnanswered
Is that assumption "more reliable than the Bible"? (Recall that the Bible predicted the 4 major European empires in Dan 7).
This ‘prediction’ is an unsupported assertion and, having read the relevant verses again, I can see no justification for making it.
Which are the four empires that are so ‘predicted’?
How are they identified as European? Indeed, why should the ‘prediction’ refer to European empires at all? Why not Asian or American, for example?
How are they identified as ‘major’? What is meant by using the word ‘major’ in the first place?
Indeed, how are these empires identified at all? What are the grounds for accepting such an identification? I can see none beyond wishful thinking.
Also recall the cities kings and events identified in the bible and also mentioned in the Ebla documents.
That some historical rulers, places and cities may be identified in the Bible, does not stand as support for an argument that everything in the Bible must also be historically correct. Cities, kings and events are identified in Homer’s
Iliad. Does this support as fact the superhuman attributes of the heroes and the mythology described in the
Iliad? Many places and events are described accurately in Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind. Does this mean that Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara were real persons? Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Historia Regnum Britanniae - The History of the Kings of Britain contains the names of historical rulers, regions, countries and cities of Europe. Does this make
The History of the Kings of Britain, devised almost entirely to legitimize the Norman rule of England, an accurate history? Claims to historical accuracy stand and fall on their own merits and the evidence that supports them, not on the argument that because this or that particular ‘fact’ in this book appears to be accurate on the face of it then other ‘facts’ in the same book must ipso facto also be accurate
